Читать онлайн «The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet...»
Автор Mark Lynas
MARK LYNAS
How the Planet Can Survive
the Age of Humans
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One -
Chapter Two -
Chapter Three -
Chapter Four -
Chapter Five -
Chapter Six -
Chapter Seven -
Chapter Eight -
Chapter Nine -
Chapter Ten -
Chapter Eleven -
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
By the same author
Copyright
Introduction
Then Man said: ‘Let there be life. ’ And there was life.
Thunderbolts do not come much more momentous than this: in May 2010, for only the second time in 3. 7 billion years, a life-form was created on planet Earth with no biological parent. Out of a collection of inanimate chemicals an animate being was forged. This transformation from non-living to living took place not in some primordial soup, still less the biblical Garden of Eden, but in a Californian laboratory. And the Divine Creator was not recognisably Godlike, despite the beard and gentle countenance. He was J. Craig Venter, a world-renowned biologist, highly successful entrepreneur and one of the first sequencers of the human genome. At the ensuing press conference, this creator and his colleagues announced to the world that they had made a self-replicating life-form out of the memory of a computer. A bacterial genome had been sequenced, digitised, modified, printed out and booted up inside an empty cell to create the first human-made organism.
As proof, the scientists wielded photographs of the microscopic ‘Forget all your fears about genetic engineering; synthetic biology makes GE look as quaint and old-fashioned as a horse and cart at a Formula One rally. Old-style biotech was about mixing and rearranging small numbers of existing natural genes from different species and hoping that the right thing happened. Synthetic biology is an order of magnitude more powerful, for it gives humanity the potential to design and create life from scratch. Venter and his team didn’t quite achieve that: their synthetic genome, after being stitched together with the help of some well-trained yeast, was transplanted into the empty cell of a closely related bacterium that was arguably already ‘alive’, at least in form if not in function. But the structure the new cells took was that prescribed by the scientists, featuring specially-designed DNA ‘watermarks’ that included three quotes, the names of the researchers on the project, and an email address for anyone clever enough to successfully decode and sequence the new genome.
